Updating my ambitions and plans

Plus revealing the ID of your author and launching a new business

Photo by John Noonan on Unsplash

My most recent article was the fiftieth I have posted here at Humble Knowledge. So now seems like an appropriate time to fill you in about some new things I will be pursuing, both here on Substack and elsewhere. I would like to start by thanking all my readers as what I have done here, and its reception, has encouraged me to branch out in a few different ways.

I started writing almost two years ago to explore and work through a number of ideas I've been mulling for a long time. I wasn't sure where it would go and decided to keep it anonymous so that it was separate from my (limited) professional identity online.

This separation of different identities has been invaluable for me personally, as it allowed me to write without worrying about the consequences. On reflection, I was probably too worried and have clearly spent too much time working in and around government where such sensitivities dominate a lot of thinking. Nevertheless it has been really helpful to have a personal intellectual play pen or sandbox to use to experiment with ideas without worrying about where it would go. However, it is time for me to give that up as I look to expand what I am doing.

More philosophy for more of my time

While I gave up my ambitions to be an academic philosopher years ago, I've been mulling ways of spending more time on philosophy and, ideally, making something of a living from it. The classic way of doing it, for someone with a Substack or writing profile online, is to ask people to pay subscriptions and build a career as a writer. However, I'm not going down this path any time soon, although I'd like to thank those who have pledged support. Writing for a paying audience creates a particular set of incentives that run in a different direction to my interests.

To earn a living through subscribers, you need to meet the expectations of your audience and give them enough of what they want to keep paying. For one, I don't see any evidence there is a big enough audience for deep dives into the philosophical structures of knowledge, or even commentary on the way cultural changes can yield natural philosophical experiments. The most reliable way to generate an income by writing for subscribers is to pick sides in the various culture wars. My interests are elsewhere and not in trying to conform to generate an income. In any case, I see myself more as a thinker and philosopher than a writer.

Given this, I'm taking a different approach to trying to pay some bills by doing philosophy and am launching a side business with a friend called Queritas to find work as 'consultant philosophers'. Our ambition is to help businesses, governments and other organisations to be sharper in their thinking and analysis and therefore be more successful at whatever they are trying to do. We offer a range of ways to help, from training to partnering, and are reasonably priced for these types of services. Many people agree with us that there is plenty of need as there is a lot of fuzzy or muddled thinking going around.

Personally, one of my core motivations behind this is to take some of the ideas I've developed here at Humble Knowledge and apply them more practically to help people and organisations. To illustrate how that might work, I'm currently talking to a couple of higher education institutions about training for academics on how to update how they teach and assess based, in significant part, on my two articles about AI.

For those who haven't yet clicked on the Queritas link, we are based in Australia, but are happy to work with anyone anywhere, especially given various online options available today. I am interested in everything from talks and presentations, through to redesigning ways of working or processes so they are more analytically robust and build on reliable epistemology. If you are interested in options, please do get in touch and I’m very happy to have a chat.

Dropping the mask

Given all of this, it is time to drop my official anonymity here at Humble Knowledge. Some of my readers already know that my name is Ryan Young and I work as a futures analyst or, if you must, a futurist at the Australian National University. Most of this work involves working confidentially with a range of organisations, mostly government agencies, but you can find some examples of my work at various places online. Of most interest to readers here may be a short research project I've recently completed with an academic colleague on understanding complex systems. You can find out a bit more about me in a couple of places including a podcast by a namesake who has been interviewing the many interesting Ryan Youngs around the world.

I intend to write more here at Humble Knowledge about the connections between futures analysis and philosophy. For now I will just comment that it is a natural place for me to work given that, by definition, we cannot currently know what will happen in the future and so need to remain humble about our predictions.

This blog will get stronger

For my readers and subscribers here, you are not likely to see many changes. I will keep writing here in the same way and hope to, over time, carve out a bit more time for it.

Over the last year, I have focused a lot on building out an account of knowledge based on limits and working through some of the implications. For the next year, my plan is to extend this in a couple of different ways. The first is to broaden it from being primarily focused on individuals - how do I know something - to consider social and group dynamics - how do we know things.

The second is to explore in more detail what is going on when we humans create the abstract representations of the world (like theories) that are the foundations of our knowledge. It is one of those things that we are so familiar with that it seems natural but the closer you look at it, the weirder it gets. So you may have to bear with me while I start pondering questions like: “what actually is a concept?” or “when we build a theory, what are we actually doing?” I’m well aware that these are abstruse questions but they are important to what I’m trying to do. But my interests here also explain why I doubt there is a big, paying subscriber market for what I want to write!

These are my current plans but I am always interested to hear the questions you would like me to tackle, so please do add your questions to the comments or emails me directly.